Bayelsa Flood: That Farouq’s Unguarded Utterance

Nigeria’s Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Umar
Farouq, has come under intense fire for her comments on the current flooding in the country. In a recent ministerial briefing, the Minister said Bayelsa State was not among the 10 most flood-hit States; rather, Jigawa, Anambra and Kogi top the list.
Subsequent upon Farouq’s exotic revelation, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) accused her of falsifying statistics of the 2022 flood impact. The rights group further impugned her for partisanship by naming Jigawa State to be the number one on the list of affected States and stating without extenuation that Bayelsa State is not even among the first 10 worst-hit States.
Similarly, the Pan Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF) severely excoriated the Minister, claiming that her affirmation further mirrored the boorish chutzpah and insensitive disdain being accorded to issues about the Niger Delta and its people by the Federal Government. Furthermore, another group, the Ijaw National Congress (INC), called on President Muhammadu Buhari to forewarn his Humanitarian Minister.
For their part, members of the Rivers and Bayelsa Caucus in the House of Representatives urged Farouq to resign over her inappropriate remarks. According to them, she put the number of people injured in Bayelsa State at 81 and the figure of deaths at 91. But reports from the Flood Management Committee and traditional rulers indicate that thousands were wounded and hundreds of Bayelsa citizens died.
As the fuss rages, the question is how did Farouk reach the statistics she relied on to declare Bayelsa State not among the top 10 states most affected by the flooding? Curiously, the criteria the Minister used to reach her conclusion were based on the following indices: the number of deaths recorded, and displaced individuals per State, number of injuries, partially and totally damaged houses, and partially and totally damaged farmlands.
These criteria are not conceivable means for establishing the spread of the flood and the attendant devastation within the affected States. Moreover, the Minister failed to visit the Niger Delta region since the flooding began. We even wonder whether as a Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, and Disaster Management, Farouq has ever been to the Niger Delta to appreciate the level of holocaust in the area following years of oil exploration.
Farouq’s claim is demoralising and absolutely antithetical to existing facts. She was unmistakably relying on ersatz data which flew in the face of clear reality that every local government in Bayelsa State was impacted by the flood in varying degrees. What pragmatic criteria did Farouq utilise to arrive at the ranking since no representative of the Federal Government has visited the State to assess the situation?
Even the United Nations depicted the flood disaster in Bayelsa State as a crisis of major proportions that deserved exclusive attention. The United Nation Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria and Representative of the Secretary-General, Mr Matthias Schmale, stated this when he led a delegation comprising officials of the global body, the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the Federal Ministry of Water Resources on a courtesy visit to Governor Douye Diri in Government House, Yenagoa.
Buhari’s administration is unfair to the people of Bayelsa State who have been mortified by losing loved ones, homes, and livelihoods. What the State needs at this time is sufficient empathy, which the Minister has failed to demonstrate since the disaster hit Bayelsans more than a month ago. This indicates that the Niger Delta is only crucial when it is time to exploit the resources in the land.
Though the flood may be great in Jigawa State and a few others, the data upon which the Minister concluded that Bayelsa State is not one of the 10 most impacted states is a brazen assault on our sensibilities and an attack on logic. It is indeed laughable but deliberately provocative. How can Jigawa, a state in the faraway North, be worst impacted when indeed Bayelsa State is an infelicitous receptor of the flood water that runs through more than 15 states?
Going by existing facts, over 300 communities were impacted by the deluge and almost a million people displaced from their homes, many of them losing their livelihoods in the Ijaw-speaking state. And no other state in the Federation is so impacted. If the Minister is desirous of doing a satisfactory job, she should exit her cosy office in Abuja and proceed to the area to ascertain the truth, even as the flood recedes.
Bayelsa State stands as the only state in the Federation where public and private schools have been closed down for six weeks because of flood-impacted losses while other states, as well as those whom the Minister says are on the top-10 most-hit states, have been managing some public and private schools and getting education amidst the menace, something that is non-existent in Bayelsa State during this critical period.
The Minister should point to a state in Nigeria whose mortuaries were overflowing with corpses and cemeteries popping up with cadavers littering the streets as the deaths were immense with no mortuaries nor burial grounds to bury the dead during the period. The truth is that Bayelsa State stands as the worst-hit state in the 2022 floods as the waters had been on the rise at over 20 feet above sea levels in several areas.
To date, the state is facing a full economic shutdown due to the flooding. More than 90 per cent of its population is directly or indirectly affected by the ravages of the torrents. Farouq must therefore withdraw her inciting statement that Bayelsa is not among the 10 worst-hit states by the cataclysm and tender an uninhibited public apology to the victims of the alluvion in the Niger Delta state for her unpardonable error of judgment.